Jews vs Zombies by Daniel Polansky, Adam Roberts, Sarah Lotz, Ofir Touché Gafla, Rena Rossner, Shimon Adaf, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Anna Tambour Read Free Book Online Page A

years after the fall of Tel Aviv.
Well, the architecture is still lovely. The state centre’s game of perspectives are wonderful, I’ll give you that. The placement of futuristic buildings in the gloomy surroundings of New England as well.
I wonder if they burned witches here.
I think about your Sultana.
Where is the story going? I wait for the part in which young Shlomo is entering the Pardes and gets the knowledge of the Chain of Worlds, and becomes Rabbi SBRJ. That’s your intention, right? To illustrate the revelation of the Rose of Judea.
But why tell the story from Sultana’s point of view? Shlomo is the interesting character.
I don’t want to push you. I know you too well for that. But what happens here seems to stem from our efforts to find the Ursprechen of the Worlds. It seems we reached some forbidden zone. Years ago Akko told me that this knowledge has the price tag of loss, of guilt, and you said – bad luck.
Well, Doron, bad luck has caught up with us. And I’m scared.
I sit at a café in Cambridge, MA, and I write to you.
I need desperately to understand something. But what is it? This is the awful thing here, isn’t it? That we can’t identify the real mystery.Help me, Doron.
T.
    25.
    *Pardes (Orchard). Entering the Pardes: more than a few visitations of humans to the realms of angles in heaven are accounted for in the Jewish esoteric literature from the second half of the third millennium to creation. The literature of Hechalot (Palaces), for instance, is a detailed one. Yet the term Entering the Pardes is ascribed to one mystical experience only, the experience of four sages of the Mishna around the year 3890. The chronicles of the Entering are mainly reported in the tractate Hagiga in the Babylonian and Jerusalem versions of the Talmud.
    No doubt an elementary form of experience is outlined in the exegeses. It’s possible that the four sages represent four different attitudes toward the place of mysticism in Jewish life: Akiva ben Yosef, who goes through the experience unharmed, is its exemplar. According to his method, Judaism is hiding the magical thinking at its base and sanctifies practices of study and memorizing instead. Shimon ben Azay died while entering the Pardes and left no evidence for his method. Elisha ben Avoya turned to heresy, id est, cancelled the validity of Judaism as a worthy practice for gaining wisdom. Of Shimon ben Zoma, it was said that he peered and was harmed or, in the common interpretation, lost his sanity. His experience is the most curious, for what is insanity in the context of mysticism?
    The devotees of the Rose of Judea believe that the knowledge ben Zoma unveiled contains a different description of the structure of reality.
    26.
    When the features of the small figure are clear to Sultana, her scream dwindles and she gazes. Parts of the child’s body – it’s a child after all – are blue. An arm and half of the face. The expression is empty. The skin at the other part is sallow, pale, oozes viscous miasma. The right eye is buried in its socket, and worms twist in it. The bare teeth are spreading a sickly glow. And he, the child, doesn’t smile, but his lips are stretched in spasm.
    He advances slowly, jerking. His arms are reaching for her. She’s unable to move. Even the stench and the whiteness of the worms turning in the right eye can’t force her nerves to shock her into motion. The child emits guttural syllables, indecipherable. He’s almost upon her; his nails are ready to cut her flesh.
    And Shlomo pushes her aside and hits the creature with the stool. The blow is muted, not even the sound of a crushing bone, just a heavy note, the note of an object sinking in soft mud, in clay. The neck is crooked, the head lies on the left shoulder. His stretched lips stay the same and he keeps on moving forward in a rigid, stubborn walk.
    Shlomo stands between her and the creature, blocks her view, but she knows nothing will stop it, that what drives it is